Arba Sicula:
Dissident, yes, but hardly obsolete. I would not at all be surprised to find out that more Catholics use birth control than not. And I don’t imagine that the percentage will get any lower.
In certain areas, there’s not a hair’s difference between the practices of Catholics and non-Catholics.
Many prominent Catholic observers believe that the pendulum is making a corrective swing back as the JPII generation of priests, educators, and lay Catholics advance more into positions of influence across the spectrum of the personal and professional. Here is a sampling of one academic’s observation:
firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0308/opinion/mcshea.html
The aspirations of these two crowds could not have been more different. Since the 1960s, the first crowd [graying, upper-middle-class liberal women of the baby-boom generation]has sought to seize power from the leaders of the Catholic Church, to recast the Church in the image of modern, liberal society, and to purge it of all distinctions, not only between male and female, but also between priest and people, and even between mankind and God Himself. By contrast, the second crowd [young, conservative Catholic graduate students and professionals, evenly divided by sex, and of visibly diverse ethnic backgrounds] turns away from the moral and philosophical confusions of the sixties toward the leaders of the Church—particularly toward a Pope who asserts without blushing his divinely ordained authority to define what is right and wrong. They embrace a view of the world that has a privileged place for lasting and binding conceptions of natural and divine law, and for the traditional authorities that continue to expound such teachings despite the world’s resounding rejection of them.
Having been a student at Harvard for five years—first as an undergraduate, now as a Master’s candidate in religious studies—I have observed a growing chasm between the aspirations of the generation that is teaching us and those of more and more of my peers who are returning not merely to traditional ways of thinking, but in a remarkable number of cases, to the orthodox Christianity many of their parents rejected in their youth. While it would be misleading to say that such students make up anything more than a small minority at Harvard, their numbers are undeniably growing, in large part because of their infectiously hopeful spirit.
These are exciting times for the Catholic Church in America, as the eventful April weekend at Harvard proved to me and my friends in abundance. There is a generational struggle afoot, and it is not at all what the 1960s generation would have predicted it would be. Young men and women are turning to the ancient wisdom of the Church—even at Harvard University.
Bronwen Catherine McShea is a Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School and a 2002 graduate of Harvard College.
